The Blood Artists

They moved past a stunted Plainville tree that had suffered an aberrant surge of growth before dying. He watched Melanie’s head turn to a profile as they floated past its outreaching branches. She slid away to the opposite side of the small boat.

The stream path angled right and ended at a small island. Maryk steered onto a worn dirt slip next to an older Zodiac launch with faded lettering along its scum-ringed sides. They disembarked onto a well-trodden path that had seen heavy things dragged over it.

They stopped under another savage tree. The wood was barkless and blistered and swirled into inscrutable knots. Its sulfur-yellow roots had erupted and burrowed back down again into the mire like elbows trying to raise the trunk from the earth.

“This is the virus?” she said quietly.

Maryk nodded.

“Why isn’t it spreading?”

The Plainville plants and trees lay in dark patches surrounded by healthy flora. Maryk looked up at the wide rifts in the canopy and the morning sunlight beating through.

“Sunlight,” he said. “A natural barrier.” It was the same as it had been in Africa. All viruses fell apart when exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet rays.

She stayed close to him as the footpath led to a long structure draped in canvas. It was some twenty yards in length and appeared to be a series of camping tents stitched together. Camouflaging branches and leaves littered the mismatched roofs.

A door flap had been cut into the near corner. Maryk lifted it from the bottom and listened before entering. The smell that escaped was pungent. Melanie started to gag but Maryk pulled her the rest of the way inside.

Spears of dusty daylight burned down through slashes in the canvas roof. Maryk’s eyes adjusted to wooden workbenches along both walls and a central row of rough-hewn tables. He saw dairy pails nearby, bottles of chemicals, and measuring devices and scales. There was a heavy press, a bucket of dirty syringes, and knives as well as other anatomizing instruments.

Dead Plainville plants sat in heaps of burst pottery and dry soil. They clutched at the tables like ivy. Scores of small dead carcasses lay flayed on the center tables in varying stages of dissection. Maryk guessed they might have been rats.

“Oh my—” Melanie recoiled and grabbed for the door flap behind them.

Maryk gripped her arm and pulled her ahead. They passed a discarded BDC contact suit lying atop a work space. A blistered plant arm had grown over it.

At the end of the rows of worktables stood dozens of small metal cages filled with decomposing rats. As many as eight to a cage were rotted with Plainville. The odor there was as thick as steam. Melanie began to cough and retch and tugged on him. Maryk released her and he went on alone.

Plainville plants in clay pots filled the dark floor space from the middle of the tent to the far canvas wall. The colors were ferocious and thriving as though choked to brilliance. The plants had erupted from their arranged pots and slithered outward along the dirt ground as though dragging themselves forward. Maryk waded in among them. Some lay unmolested in an open space of dirt as though respected or feared. Their bright leaves gleamed as though with perspiration and their tentacular stems and wildly textured leaves scorned nature. Shards of busted pottery lay wound in vinelike branches as though in the grip of florid fists.

Maryk heard a weak voice behind him.

“I came here to kill him, Peter.”

Stephen was standing inside the door flap. A ray of daylight through the torn canvas above lit his surgical skullcap and shadowed the recesses of his face.

“He’s not here,” he continued. “But he knows we are. I set off a silent alarm.”

“Stephen.” Maryk moved past Melanie toward him.

“Outside,” Stephen said. He pushed through the canvas flap and daylight shone in profanely.

Maryk rushed out after him. There was a wooden bench set in front of the tent and Stephen was making his way to it. He moved well with the cane but his physical appearance had further declined. He was drenched in sweat and impossibly thin. The sores about his arms and legs had darkened and massed and bled. He looked like a cadaver. He looked as though he were brittling into wood.

Melanie came gagging through the tent door behind Maryk. One look at Stephen calmed her. She fought down a swallow.

Stephen showed her a much-weakened grin. “Hello, Melanie,” he said.

Maryk said, “What is this, Stephen?”

“A hiding place. He couldn’t spread his virus indiscriminately. He needed a place where he could live freely. He wanted only controlled outbreaks, remember?”

“Who, Stephen?”

“Plainville’s Patient Zero. Something incredible has happened here, Peter. I need you to keep an open mind.”

Maryk’s concerns about Stephen’s mental health were being realized. “Plainville was more than four years ago,” he said. “Just tell me — what is this place?”

Stephen motioned with a wooden hand for patience. “An open mind,” he said. “I was thinking about the girl in Africa, assuming that she had been infected and also gotten the experimental serum. I was thinking what it must have done to her. She would have been like a walking laboratory, Peter, like lightning in a bottle. I decided that there had to be a secondary transmission, even though we knew there had been no other reported cases in that region. So I started to think. The only other people near the camp, aside from the Pygmies, was the RECI group. I called up a list of their scientists, and on a whim cross-referenced it with the Plainville voting register. It was that simple, Peter. One name came up on both lists. Oren Ridgeway, a botanist out of the University of Michigan. He returned to the states from his RECI tour just two weeks after the firebombing of the camp.”